Since the Commish Corner forum is devoid of all responses, I'll try this question here.

The main league I'm in has been a keeper league for about 3-4 years now. We're currently set-up as a 10-team mixed, 5 player keeper +1 if you kept one of your last 3 picks in the draft. We need to change our set-up b/c the 1st place team is so far ahead it's barely even fun for him. (It's not me) I think we need to institute some sort of salary cap/luxury tax rule (though it's not an auction league) or some sort of time limit that a player can be kept but unsure of how to go about it. The other option we could explore is the keep players for increasing draft slots.

Personally, I like the draft slot idea, but am unsure how to implement it mid-keeper. For example, my 5 keepers would be David Wright, Carlos Beltran, Jimmy Rollins, Justin Morneau, Jake Peavy and Brandon Phillips. Would I just be slotting those guys in Rds 1-6 then the following year, I'd have to give up the guy that I kept in Rd 1? Is that right?

The main league I'm in has been a keeper league for about 3-4 years now. We're currently set-up as a 10-team mixed, 5 player keeper +1 if you kept one of your last 3 picks in the draft. We need to change our set-up b/c the 1st place team is so far ahead it's barely even fun for him. (It's not me) I think we need to institute some sort of salary cap/luxury tax rule (though it's not an auction league) or some sort of time limit that a player can be kept but unsure of how to go about it. The other option we could explore is the keep players for increasing draft slots.

Personally, I like the draft slot idea, but am unsure how to implement it mid-keeper. For example, my 5 keepers would be David Wright, Carlos Beltran, Jimmy Rollins, Justin Morneau, Jake Peavy and Brandon Phillips. Would I just be slotting those guys in Rds 1-6 then the following year, I'd have to give up the guy that I kept in Rd 1? Is that right?

There's really no right or wrong to what you're describing. In our league, we do the increasing draft slot method, plus we limit the number of years a player can be kept. If you keep your first round player, you lost your #1 pick but also your 11th round pick (replaced by a supplemental pick at the end of the draft). I'd be happy to give you more details if you're interested (PM me I suppose).

I started a thread here a while back that discussed various implementations of keeper leagues. Might be worth digging that up. A few quick comments:

- My keeper league used to do the simple "you can keep X players", and yes, it will be subject to the sort of stagnation you describe.- A common way to address that problem is to make guys increase in cost the longer they are kept. There are various ways of doing that. But rather than just saying, "You can't keep a guy more than X years", basically just make it impractical to do so; you CAN protect him for 7 years, but you'll be protecting nobody else, and losing badly.- My league instituted a rule specifically for the case you are talking about. At a high level the point is that the winner is subject to more stringent protection rules than the other managers. My league uses a "years of service" model, where a guy's cost is dictated largely by how long he's been protected. Each time gets to protect 20 "years of service", except the winner, who only gets to protect 8. This helps break up dynasties so the whole league doesn't get bored. And it ends up giving the winner a real challenge to rebuild.

I'm also thinking of implementing a "Florida Marlins" approach to hit this stagnation thing on the head. The winner has to disband his team, 2nd place keeps 1, 3rd place keeps 2... last place keeps 9. That way the talent is redistributed throughout the league and the competitive balance is somewhat restored. Thoughts on that?

We had a similar problem where myself and another guy are always 1-2 by 15 points above everyone else. We decided this year to drop the number of keepers to help low ranking teams get a good quality player.

Unless his keepers are Arod, Vlad, Sizemore, Reyes, and Santana quality (which i would have to wonder how he got 5 1st rounders), he still has to draft a large portion of his team. While keepers help you still have to draft 2/3rds of your team, both of us are in the position we are in because we draft well. If you look at the people i got during the draft and the round i got them in (verlander 10th, beckett 11th, haren 12th, c. guillen 9th) and what he got (dunn 10th, maggs 12th , etc), its very apparent why we are in 1st.

Part of the baseball is knowing how to draft and looking for the rebound player or breakout season. 5 keepers are not going to win the league for you. The other part is knowing how to make trades. Trading is a science that you have to learn your other managers, and make the right trade at the right time.

Drunken Rhino wrote:I'm also thinking of implementing a "Florida Marlins" approach to hit this stagnation thing on the head. The winner has to disband his team, 2nd place keeps 1, 3rd place keeps 2... last place keeps 9. That way the talent is redistributed throughout the league and the competitive balance is somewhat restored. Thoughts on that?

does the last place team even have 9 keepers. I would think the teams that aren't keeping many players are going to just redraft the solid players they had to let go...

A kid in my roto keeper league has unbelievable keepers AROD, Pujols, Utley, Sizemore, and Rios. and his team is in 4th of 8 teams. The Reason... alot of teams kept later draft picks and used the their first picks to take all pitching for the most part. i believe this persons team has an era of 4.40 and a Whip of 1.38.

darb48824 wrote:A kid in my roto keeper league has unbelievable keepers AROD, Pujols, Utley, Sizemore, and Rios. and his team is in 4th of 8 teams. The Reason... alot of teams kept later draft picks and used the their first picks to take all pitching for the most part. i believe this persons team has an era of 4.40 and a Whip of 1.38.

I assume you have no rule against trading...

"I do not think baseball of today is any better than it was 30 years ago... I still think Radbourne is the greatest of the pitchers." John Sullivan 1914-Old athletes never change.

darb48824 wrote:A kid in my roto keeper league has unbelievable keepers AROD, Pujols, Utley, Sizemore, and Rios. and his team is in 4th of 8 teams. The Reason... alot of teams kept later draft picks and used the their first picks to take all pitching for the most part. i believe this persons team has an era of 4.40 and a Whip of 1.38.

While that is very interesting, how would you change our current keeper system to keep it fair?

Drunken Rhino wrote:I'm also thinking of implementing a "Florida Marlins" approach to hit this stagnation thing on the head. The winner has to disband his team, 2nd place keeps 1, 3rd place keeps 2... last place keeps 9. That way the talent is redistributed throughout the league and the competitive balance is somewhat restored. Thoughts on that?

We thought about something similar to this is my league. (We have the same problem.) Almost noone liked it. How can you rebuild a team when if you finish near the top you lose everybody? Also, if you like your keepers and you know you are out of it, why play on?

I wanted to do a tiered version of this: top 3 keep up to 4, next 3 keep up to 5, etc. This lets the bottom teams keep young players and prospects if they want and still lets the top teams hold on to their stars. I didn't get that one through the commish.

One of the reasons we made our league into a keeper was so that we could enjoy prospecting young players and seeing them pan out for our teams. The problem we have with 'dynasties' is that some guys did not do a good job of that and some guys did a good job of it. The same ones who are good at picking young players also tend to be the good drafters, then they build up talent and can offer win-win trades that make them better and better without shafting anyone.

As far as changing to the draft slot system mid way, I think the fairest method is to use this year's stats or a set of next year's projections that your team can agree on and treat that as the draft. Any top ten player cost round 1, 11-20 round 2, etc.